Of Interest

Ephraim Williams’ birthday was three weeks ago. I am sorry to have missed the party. Were any readers present? EphBlog author Morgan Goodwin ’08 certainly looks dashing in a tricorner hat. I liked this part:

Williams College traditionally recognizes the birth date of founder Colonel Ephraim Williams, Jr., as March 7, 1715, but a February 24 birthday nod to Williams wouldn’t be a full faux pas. When Williams was born in Newton, Mass., most Protestant-led countries ignored Catholic Pope Gregory’s Gregorian Calendar, which had been initiated about 270 years earlier. With an 11-day span between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, Williams’ birth date is believed originally recorded as February 24. But when Great Britain and the American colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, Williams suddenly found that he had not only a new birth date but also a new birth month!

And a new zoological sign. Is it prurient of me to wonder about this?

Williams was killed during the French and Indian War Battle of Lake George in 1755. The 40-year-old bachelor Colonel met his demise during what became known as “The Bloody Morning Scout,” after he and his troops were ambushed. Historic lore asserts that Williams’ horse was shot from beneath him during the attack. When he ascended a rock to gather and direct his troops, Williams was fatally shot in the head.

How many rich men in 18th century New England were never-married “bachelors?” Not that many, I think. Take it away Professor Chris Waters!

5 Responses to “Happy Birthday Ephraim!”

In the chaotic period surrounding the Revolution, the founders saw the figure of the bachelor as the most dangerous element, lacking self-restraint, rationality and virtue and living by his “appetites” in what English forebears called a “lapsed state of manhood.”

“American leaders applied the grammar of manhood to stigmatize, ridicule, degrade and humiliate the bachelor by portraying him as a man-child who did not merit the rights of men, fraternal respect or civic standing,” Kann writes.

Franklin was the hardest on the bachelor, calling him a “grown boy” or “half man.”

“Take into your wise consideration the great and growing number of bachelors in the country, many of whom, from the mean fear of the expenses of family, have never sincerely and honorably courted a woman in their lives; and by their manner of living leave unproduced (which is little better than murder) hundreds of their posterity into the thousandth generation,” warned a female character in a story written by Franklin.

If the bachelor was lowest white man on the totem pole, the founders held out the family man as “a symbol of male maturity in the service of citizenship,” Kann found.

“Many founders felt that the family man’s sense of self-restraint and caring for posterity qualified him as a trustworthy man and deserving citizen,” Kann writes. “He was not apt to indulge passion or act on impulse lest he imperil his dependents and family dynasty.”

Alexander Hamilton described marriage as “a state which with a kind of magnetic force attracts every breast to it in which sensibility has a place,” although “the dull admonitions of prudence” might tempt young men to resist it. Demonstrating the manner in which Federalists equated fatherhood with having an important stake in the future of the young nation, Hamilton once described his own children as “the dearest pledges of [his] patriotism.”

(from the article) … Williams College first president, Ebenezer Fitch, offered a vividly descriptive written assessment of Williams through a biographical sketch published during 1802.

“His address was easy and his manners pleasing and conciliating,” Fitch wrote. “Affable and facetious, he could make himself agreeable in all companies; and was very generally esteemed, respected, and beloved.” …

Not an unsought goal for many of us old boys as we ventured into life!

Would that this description of the Founder could be applied to many more of his College namesakes!

When I wrote my History honors thesis on Williams in the 1930’s, Ephraim Williams’ ability to “make himself agreeable in all companies” was invoked from time to time as proof that Williams from the start had been meant to be a “gentleman’s college.”

And is that ‘armigeri’ ‘soldier’ or, more roughly, ‘the rank of squire’?

While ‘from the start’ may not apply to the free school and later descriptions of raw country lads attending in the early 1800’s, the idea of a gentlemen’s college in the best sense of those words is not a disagreeable argument in this time of ‘clever, ruthless men’ as quoted in our own ephblog in a story about a fellow alum.